Question

I’m currently working on databinding some of my existing Windows Forms, and I’ve ran into an issue figuring out the proper way of databinding a group of radiobutton controls within a group box.

My business object has an integer property which I want to databind against 4 radiobuttons (where each of them represents the values 0 – 3).

I’m currently binding against a presenter object which works as the binder between the form and the business object, and the way I’ve done it now is to have 4 separate properties which each binds against each of these values (I do use INotifyPropertyChanged, but not including that here):

Private int _propValue;

Public bool PropIsValue0 
{ 
  get { return _propValue == 0; }
  set
  {
    if (value) 
      _propValue = 0;
  }
}

Public bool PropIsValue1 { // As above, but with value == 1 }
Public bool PropIsValue2 { // As above, but with value == 2 }
Public bool PropIsValue3 { // As above, but with value == 3 }

And I then bind each of the radiobuttons to their respective property as above.

This does not seem right to me, so any advice are highly appreciated.

Answer 1

Following is a generic RadioGroupBox implementation in the spirit of ArielBH’s suggestion (some code borrowed from Jay Andrew Allen’s RadioPanel). Just add RadioButtons to it, set their tags to different integers and bind to the ‘Selected’ property.

public class RadioGroupBox : GroupBox
{
    public event EventHandler SelectedChanged = delegate { };

    int _selected;
    public int Selected
    {
        get
        {
            return _selected;
        }
        set
        {
            int val = 0;
            var radioButton = this.Controls.OfType<RadioButton>()
                .FirstOrDefault(radio =>
                    radio.Tag != null 
                   && int.TryParse(radio.Tag.ToString(), out val) && val == value);

            if (radioButton != null)
            {
                radioButton.Checked = true;
                _selected = val;
            }
        }
    }

    protected override void OnControlAdded(ControlEventArgs e)
    {
        base.OnControlAdded(e);

        var radioButton = e.Control as RadioButton;
        if (radioButton != null)
            radioButton.CheckedChanged += radioButton_CheckedChanged;
    }

    void radioButton_CheckedChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        var radio = (RadioButton)sender;
        int val = 0;
        if (radio.Checked && radio.Tag != null 
             && int.TryParse(radio.Tag.ToString(), out val))
        {
            _selected = val;
            SelectedChanged(this, new EventArgs());
        }
    }
}

Note that you can’t bind to the ‘Selected’ property via the designer due to initialization order problems in InitializeComponent (the binding is performed before the radio buttons are initialized, so their tag is null in the first assignment). So just bind yourself like so:

    public Form1()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
        //Assuming selected1 and selected2 are defined as integer application settings
        radioGroup1.DataBindings.Add("Selected", Properties.Settings.Default, "selected1");
        radioGroup2.DataBindings.Add("Selected", Properties.Settings.Default, "selected2");
    }